Sony Patent Hints At Backwards Compatibility For PS5
Mike Sanders / 6 years ago
Sony Patent Hints At Backwards Compatibility For PS5
While there has been very little news in 2018 regarding the next generation of consoles, that isn’t entirely shocking. With the Xbox One and PS4 now approaching their 5th year since release though, sooner or later, rumours are going to start emerging about the consoles. Put simply, expect the latter half of 2019 to be very busy in terms of console news!
At the moment, while we may not have much, Sony has just released a patent document which is very interesting. One that could indicate plans for the next PlayStation to have backwards compatibility.
A Missed Trick
One of the biggest issues with the last 2 generations of PlayStation consoles has been no backwards compatibility. As such, with the new console arriving, to continue playing your old games, you still had to have it hooked up. Well, actually, that’s not strictly true. Very early PS3 models did have PS2 compatibility, however, this was removed in updates and scrapped shortly after. I won’t go into detail, but it is suggested that the emulation received very poor feedback from all concerned.
With the new PlayStation likely to arrive in 2020, the concept of re-introducing backwards compatibility is very interesting. Particularly given now how long a life-span the PS3 had and the PS4 will have.
How Do We Know This?
In the patent published by Sony (which you can read in full here), while most of it is rather dry, the image above is rather curious. It shows a basic diagram as to how older style graphics could be remastered (essentially re-rendered) into more higher quality automatically. While this may not necessarily be such an issue for the PS4, a number of PS3 games could certainly use a little polish if they were to be played again.
What do you think? Would you like the PS5 to be backwards compatible? Which consoles imparticular would you like this to include? – Let us know in the comments!
Tell Me More!
Check out our PlayStation 5 What We Know So Far feature here. Our Xbox Two What We Know So Far here, or our other “What We Know So Far” features here.
